On Optimal Placement of Short Range Base Stations for Indoor Position Estimation

The use of short-range wireless for object positioning has seen a growing interest in recent years. This interest is compounded by the inherent GPS limitations especially in indoor situations and in urban canyons. In order to achieve the highest performance of short-range positioning systems it is important to optimize the placement of Base-Stations (BSs) in a given area. The problems of BSs placement to minimize error and to achieve multiple coverage of the area have been addressed separately in the literature. In this paper, we discuss that using short range BSs the two problems are interrelated and need to be solved jointly. We study the impact of different influential attributes of the positioning problem as we alter the layout of BSs in the area. We investigate different scenarios for short-range BSs placement that maximize coverage and minimize positioning error. Simulation results demonstrate that better performance could be achieved using layouts that tend to distribute the BSs uniformly.